Friday, September 28, 2012

If you're wondering about that last one and how it relates to Nintendo, the Famicom Disk Writer was a peripheral that was only ever released in Japan. Basically, games for the Disk Writer were released on rewriteable floppy disk (take a look at the original Legend of Zelda disk, for an example) and led to, as far as I know, the first cases of console game piracy.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Gravity Falls is currently my favorite cartoon on TV. This is just a genuinely high-quality show. Everything from the animation to the writing to the voice work goes above and beyond typical Saturday Morning Cartoon fare. It's also extremely funny: just about everything that Mabel says and does cracks me up. The show also boasts a remarkable voice cast: Jason Ritter and Kirsten Schaal play the two main kids, Dipper and Mabel, with Linda Cardinelli, John DiMaggio and Will Forte amongst the supporting cast. Guests have included Coolio, Larry King, John Oliver, Alfred Molina, Stephen Root, Horatio Sanz and Chris Parnell.

The Amazing World of Gumball is an odd, collage-like little show that I happened to stumble across recently. Nominally written for kids, I would say the big selling point of Gumball is the art style - it's a mash-up of two dozen different types of traditional animation, stop-motion animation, CGI, real-world photography and puppetry. Literally every character on this show (the Watterson family excluded) is presented in a different artistic style. It's a very unique premise for a cartoon, and one that creator ben Bocquelet and his team pull off with aplomb.

Regular Show, which I've posted about here before, is just fine television. That is all.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

A disclaimer: I try to avoid anything steampunk here, because let's be honest - steampunk has been done to death, and then some. I could go into a whole rant about steampunk, in fact, and how it was a novelty for about six months back in 2002 before it got co-opted by the Hot Topic crowd and blown completely out of proportion, but that wouldn't change the fact that blue-haired teenagers wearing corsets, goggles and top hats would continue to celebrate an era of western history typified by its horrific working conditions, abuse of children and the poor, and rampant, unchecked colonial expansionism. So I'll leave it alone.

But, having said that, sometimes I come across something that uses steampunk tropes to its advantage, and that's what we have here, with Brian Kesinger's clever steampunk\Transformers mashup. As you may or may not know, depending on how nerdy you are, IDW published a steampunk Transformers miniseries, called "Hearts of Steel". Kesinger's industrial revolution revisions of Transformers blows that officially sanctioned concept out of the water, thanks to his attention to detail and a number of sardonic touches.

In particular, I love how both Optimus and Megatron are sporting mustaches. I love how Optimus turns into a steam-powered locomotive, Megatron into a baroquely-patterned sixshooter, and Soundwave into a victrola\player piano. I love how era-specific hats have been incorporated into each character's robot mode.

If more steampunk had as much of a sense of humor as this, I probably wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it out of hand.

Interesting fact: there is not much in the way of Dragon's Lair fanart that is a) well-done and b) not pervy. There is a LOT of Dragon's Lair fanart that is pervy and very well-done, but this is not that kind of blog. The above three pieces represent basically the only three works of fan-art I was even remotely comfortable posting.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

In other news, Heather bought me Ocarina of Time for the 3DS last weekend and I've been playing the HECK out of it. Turns out I never actually got that far in the N64 version of the game because this is all new to me.